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Make Firefox Private Again

mrinfinitiesx
121 replies
17h36m

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.'

Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement.

No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem.

I turned it off in about:config

raxxorraxor
48 replies
9h14m

Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.

That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.

If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.

LunaSea
36 replies
7h31m

How can you say that the infrastructure costs are secondary?

How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

nulbyte
28 replies
7h6m

How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.

When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

JumpCrisscross
16 replies
6h18m

When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content

This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.

autoexec
4 replies
1h51m

Honestly, when the internet was younger the costs to host content were basically zero. Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs. Many ISPs offered shell accounts and provided basic webhosting at no additional cost. These could be scaled up as needed, but everybody with a modem and an ISP had the opportunity to take part in sharing content on the internet.

lxgr
3 replies
1h6m

Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs.

On dialup?

autoexec
2 replies
1h4m

Yes. Websites back then didn't have hundreds of MBs of javascript bloat though so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. The internet over 56k was surprisingly usable.

lxgr
1 replies
1h0m

Maybe in terms of bandwidth, but unless you were fine with never being able to make or receive any more phone calls, how would hosting a website have worked without a second dedicated phone line?

In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.

autoexec
0 replies
52m

It did need a dedicated line. Same with the people who ran a BBS out of their home. I knew people who had 3-5 dedicated phone lines running into their houses to support that. Paying per minute for dial up was thankfully not something I had to deal with (unless I was calling into a PoP that was long distance). I can see how the costs of that would get insane very quickly.

Intralexical
3 replies
5h53m

That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.

LunaSea
2 replies
5h8m

That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.

kjkjadksj
1 replies
2h54m

Donations were and are a thing for covering hosting costs in many communities.

LunaSea
0 replies
1h44m

Not if the site serves videos and has 2024-levels world traffic.

lagniappe
2 replies
6h3m

Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right.

exe34
0 replies
2h51m

has anybody tried to argue this here? who are you replying to?

JumpCrisscross
0 replies
6h2m

Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right

Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.

kjkjadksj
1 replies
2h55m

The thing is, if your community is small costs are probably in the couple dollars a month range. An order of magnitude lower than the costs of hardware like your computer. If communities are large where an individual cannot trivially bear the costs, donation models have worked where the community itself funds its hosting.

lxgr
0 replies
1h7m

Not nearly everybody on the Internet has ever bought their own computer. There's schools, public libraries etc., to say nothing of the billions of people that have only a smartphone and no desktop or laptop at all.

exe34
0 replies
2h52m

I'd happily provide hosting to a whole lot of media that I enjoy myself and would love to share. I might have bandwidth limits each month, but within reason, I'd share.

predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.

Terretta
0 replies
4h52m

This silences a large number of people

I'd argue advertising silences many more.

Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*

* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.

LunaSea
10 replies
6h57m

When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.

The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.

I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.

nottorp
8 replies
6h38m

which didn't have the volume

agreed

and quality

filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

cassianoleal
6 replies
6h25m

Agree. Production quality != overall quality. I'd much rather have great content badly produced than professionally produced crap.

LunaSea
5 replies
4h47m

Most people still seem to watch Hollywood quality movies so I don't know if your taste is very representative.

nottorp
2 replies
4h4m

High sales != quality. Maybe high sales ~= lowest common denominator?

LunaSea
1 replies
3h8m

High sales doesn't mean quality but it does reflect the choice of the majority.

So if we were to move to a world where high quality productions were not feasible anymore for some reason or another then by definition most people would find this to be a problem.

nottorp
0 replies
2h25m

No, I think the majority would just take what they're given.

Most "content" is "consumed" just to have something to do.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
2h51m

Would they watch so many if they weren’t available at every movie theater in town and every streaming service on earth? A lot of attention has been devoted to such movies that would have been invested elsewhere in other efforts if movies didn’t exist.

cassianoleal
0 replies
2h40m

If by Hollywood quality you mean that it's professionally produced to a high standard (of production, of course), than I don't see what's bad about that. I only said I value content quality much more than production quality. Great content produced to a high standard is better than the same content badly produced.

There are some great movies out of Hollywood.

LunaSea
0 replies
4h47m

filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.

raxxorraxor
0 replies
6h13m

I would argue that the average quality was higher by a few magnitudes due to the higher entry barrier alone. The average production value is higher these days, but that doesn't correlate with quality too much. Simple truth is that hobbyists, enthusiasts and professionals are often one and the same people.

There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.

With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.

Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.

I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.

cynicalsecurity
4 replies
7h16m

Through torrents, for example.

LunaSea
3 replies
7h0m

The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.

And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.

Intralexical
1 replies
5h54m

The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.

Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.

Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.

No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.

The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.

LunaSea
0 replies
5h6m

Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.

I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.

No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.

It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.

The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.

Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.

ben_w
0 replies
5h46m

Seems like you think the whole collection has to be in one single torrent, rather than a separate torrent for each video, and that the complete works of all channels have to be seeded from a single source?

The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.

It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"

jazzyjackson
1 replies
5h42m

I pay my telecom for 500mbit up and down, what other infrastructure must be paid for to support torrenting?

Zetaphor
0 replies
3h24m

Each individual seeder is paying for electricity, storage, and internet access to make those torrents available to you.

stavros
3 replies
9h2m

It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

It was better before the insane amount of advertising.

Pet_Ant
2 replies
5h25m

It was better before the insane amount of advertising.

There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.

strictnein
0 replies
2h50m

Geocities is an interesting case. It didn't start with ads and they monitored sites and told people to remove them (I received one such email). It wasn't out of some altruistic ideals though. They just didn't want anyone to advertise before they got their ads running on everyone's sites.

geobmx540
0 replies
3h7m

In the beginning there was no ads, but they got pretty aggressive at the end (1999ish)

mschuster91
2 replies
7h12m

Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership).

A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.

Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.

lelanthran
1 replies
5h2m

The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.

If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?

BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.

mschuster91
0 replies
4h40m

If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?

Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns.

The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.

xeromal
1 replies
5h17m

I might not be old enough to remember when the internet was ad free but I'm 34 and since I've been on the internet, popups and advertising garbage have always been around. I want to say I started using it around 1996-1997

rchaud
0 replies
5h8m

Ad space was sold directly by the website owner, and the ad banner was just static HTML or an image served from the site directly. Then iframes and DoubleClick arrived, and suddenly ads were served from third party sites via iframes, which would load advertiser scripts and it was downhill from there.

dylan604
0 replies
2h33m

It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions.

It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.

autoexec
0 replies
1h57m

If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature.

This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users.

They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.

spondylosaurus
21 replies
11h52m

I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.

idle_zealot
13 replies
11h14m

If HN didn't exist people would gather on another link aggregator.

p-e-w
8 replies
10h36m

And yet no successful link aggregator has ever been "free" or "open" in a meaningful sense.

Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of people, with no recourse or accountability.

I've been listening to users lamenting "the tech to avoid centralized control doesn't exist" etc. for 20 years, but it definitely does exist today, and it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.

zanellato19
4 replies
3h21m

Centralization is what makes stuff like this interesting. I come here because the comments are nice, not just because the links are interesting.

It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.

bluGill
3 replies
2h37m

The fediverse gets all those centralization advantages without being centralized. However there are not (yet!) the quantity of people needed to make it work.

inkywatcher
2 replies
1h47m

Nor quality, unfortunately.

bluGill
1 replies
35m

Depends on what you want. some places you can find just as high quality. There is a lot of junk out there to wage through. They also have a "allergic reaction" to the thought of an algorithm to curate feeds which throws the good out with the bad.

inkywatcher
0 replies
16m

I would very sincerely ask what places and what quality?

yeevs
0 replies
8h48m

I think the problem is simply the network effect. Reddit and Twitter are just hard to beat, maybe threads, utilizing the massive Instagram user base managed but I haven't heard anyone use it and I don't think you can force it

throwaway34760
0 replies
1h33m

Matrix

Not a link aggregator.

Lemmy

Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?

digging
0 replies
2h31m

it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.

This is a fallacy. Sounds like you're invoking "revealed preference."

I care strongly that decentralized tech like Lemmy exists... but Lemmy is a dumpster fire project badly managed, so I've given up on using it.

dumbo-octopus
2 replies
10h57m

HN is only as good as dang makes it. There are a ton of other link aggregators out there, many more “free” than this. Yet here we are. Why? Because the folks behind this link aggregator pay dang to be here.

InfiniteLoup
0 replies
9h40m

There is obviously also a network effect at play here that makes people unwilling to explore new options. But just like MySpace, Facebook or tumblr showed you can always ruin a good thing and eventually people will move onto greener pastures.

However, I love love love Hackernews and dang is one of the main reasons this little internet place became such an oasis for the intellectually curious, and interesting as well as serious conversation.

Gud
0 replies
9h38m

What are they? Can you link to them? Would love to see what else is out there! Personally I don't care much for discussion about web programming really, but more general tech news(fusion, space and the related politics).

rty32
0 replies
9h53m

Care to explain how those websites are funded? Would any of them be viable with the amount of traffic of HN (server, moderation etc)?

xg15
1 replies
7h17m

On a free forum ran by an actual VC even, not just powered by the money...

krapp
0 replies
5h14m

Yeah but the layout is basic and doesn't use javascript so you know they're cool.

sobellian
0 replies
4h34m

HN does not have extensive server costs. Last I saw (~10 years ago) it was running off a single machine in a closet. Apparently they've since moved to two machines at a hosting company.

rchaud
0 replies
5h2m

It's no more ironic than the thousands of Google-related topics on this site that focus on their technology, and almost entirely ignores their ad business that holds up the entire operation and drives their strategy.

If Google drops some pet projects we'll see the same predictable stream of comments blaming ladder-climbing PMs, MBA management, H1B employees, everything other than the simplest explanation, that the powers that be got tired of subsidizing it with the one line of business that actually makes money.

kerkeslager
0 replies
8h40m

I come here largely to find out what VC money (and the culture around it) is doing because it affects me (and everyone). Don't mistake that for supporting what VC money is doing.

immibis
0 replies
6h33m

the relationship this forum has to the VC is similar to what a lot of forums had to their operators. There is little direct revenue gathering here - the VCs make money in other ways and spend a small fraction of it on this forum. At most, they advertise their other activities sometimes. The whole web used to be like this.

dartharva
0 replies
3h29m

Hey, if the VCs don't want to run this site, I will gladly host it for free.

Buttons840
14 replies
15h59m

Without advertisements, the internet would only have content worth paying for and content people want to share for reasons other than financial gain. How awful (/s).

kelnos
12 replies
13h29m

That's the thing... people would still make free content, and since there wouldn't be as many shady ways to monetize, it would cut down on low-effort (and AI-generated) garbage. The internet would be such a better place.

We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.

nox101
7 replies
9h34m

I'm pretty confident that without advertising, the majority of YouTube channels people love most would not exist.

maybe overall that would be a good thing as there's so much trash too

hypeatei
2 replies
7h10m

I'm pretty sure ad revenue for most channels is negligible so they resort to third party sponsorships or platforms like Patreon. The advertisements are there for Google to recoup some of the cost of running YT.

nox101
1 replies
2h29m

not sure what your point is. let's assume it's true. That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos. Without that those channels would have to pay for hosting themselves and could not afford to make the content.

Further, most of them would have never even tried if it wasn't free to start

Then, I don't buy your premise. Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly for Brilliant, NordVPN, etc... which means even without YouTube's ads they're still ad driven

hypeatei
0 replies
1h21m

Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly

Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.

That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos

Your assertion was related to the channels themselves existing, not YT as a platform. I can agree that the platform probably wouldn't exist without some sort of funding source but that doesn't necessarily need to come from ads.

grishka
1 replies
8h12m

And that's fine. YouTube channels are always better when they're someone's hobby rather than a full-time job.

nox101
0 replies
2h27m

hard disagree. the majority of the channels I love the most have become full time jobs.

rchaud
0 replies
4h56m

Youtube didn't have ads for years. Yet there was plenty of content people uploaded with no expectation of payment. Just like the early Internet. MIT OCW and Khan Academy also pre-date YT.

As for all the high production value channels out there now, YT doesn't pay their bills, subscriptions, brand deals and merchandise do. YT is like MTV: good for exposure, the real product is sold through other channels.

digging
0 replies
2h27m

Most of my favorite channels make more money from one or more of:

1. Premium subscribers

2. Direct support on Patreon

3. Direct video sponsorship (a form of advertising, but wholly tolerable IMO)

4. Direct support by joining Nebula, which has no ads

fragmede
1 replies
11h38m

I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage. The high effort non-garbage stuff is produced by professionals who have the luxury of spending a full work week's amount of time improving their craft. writers writing free content with no business model can't do that unless they have a trust fund. which, I suppose they're out there, but I doubt the number of those that are writers.

josefx
0 replies
11h10m

I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage.

Right now the main search engine everyone uses is run by an ad company. Just getting rid of that conflict of interest would probably help to significantly weed out garbage.

Tepix
1 replies
9h8m

I remember an internet without ads. It was hardly all low-effeort garbage.

stavros
0 replies
8h56m

That's the GP's point too.

LunaSea
0 replies
7h27m

Most people won't pay for content, no matter how good it is.

Especially for text content.

People still download or stream movies and TV series even though there are multiple high quality and official streaming platforms.

PhasmaFelis
11 replies
11h17m

They can find other business models other than advertisement.

The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.

Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.

I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.

mrweasel
3 replies
9h23m

The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.

It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down.

All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax/license funded media would still be around and assuming that the free market is actually a thing, companies would emerge to plug the holes left be the clickbait sites, at a price.

As it stands we're seeing those with the means paying for actual content and everyone else is just getting absolute garbage.

msn.com is my favorite example, why is that still around? Most of the ads are actual scams, all article link to other sites, which are equally scammy. Why? Because it makes Microsoft money and they do not care about their users getting scammed, as long as they get their cut.

I don't think ads should be the main way we fund content online, it's clearly not working anymore. The ad space has become the product and whatever content remains is just enough to trick people to going to the site and clicking a link or two. The content is no longer about enlightening or even entertaining, it's about trapping people in some twisted hedonic treadmill.

jart
2 replies
8h0m

It's not a problem if you don't go to the parts of the web that have ads. I spend my time online on places like GitHub that operate as ad-free commission-free gift economies. Environments that have ads, have nothing that I want. I don't care about what happens in them any more than I care about what happens in shantytowns. Why do you care? What pulls you into those dark Internet spaces?

mrweasel
1 replies
6h45m

That's a fair point, but I care also care a great deal about society as a whole, and I feel like the ad model is damaging to those around me. I quite frankly don't get why TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook and others are allow to manipulate people to spend hours doom scrolling, just to show ads. TikTok even knows this is bad, because that's not how they operate in China apparently.

I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.

The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.

I don't like online ads and the web they've created.

jart
0 replies
6h9m

Society is full of predators. In the beginning, people got eaten in the jungle, and today they get monitored to learn their desires and then shown pictures of things they want. How do you know you're not being manipulated? Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you. Power is focus which means people are disempowered by getting them to focus their attention on things that don't matter. Advertisers normally need to pay cash money to buy someone's attention but you gave yours up for free. If everyone else is watching ads, then you're watching them watch ads. You're not any more free than they are. The simple fact of the matter is you won't be able to save others from this system, because you haven't even saved yourself.

black_puppydog
2 replies
11h4m

Article in German about this from August 1: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/klage-gegen-datenschutzbehoerde...

They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying.

The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks a month if you don't use targeted advertising as the "threat"? Maybe, just maybe, non-targeted advertising would already be enough? Many people pay to get rid of ads, not of surveillance, after all...

pndy
1 replies
9h35m

The question is, can you convince

Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers, I guess.

I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay.

Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned quite fast. That was still before these vicious tracking techniques and cookie banners. People simply didn't want to pay for the access. Their tagline was "Do you value good journalism?" and it was memed out because the quality of these paid materials was considered as low. Many people complained that it's not that much different from stuff available for free. Others raised an argument that access to the information on the Internet should be free and they didn't want to spend money on this. Discussion happen, taking on paid content in general but whole thing fizzled out just like that paywall system.

black_puppydog
0 replies
4h25m

I'm afraid that it's a new trend

Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?

And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.

Terretta
1 replies
4h43m

You're arguing that speech should earn a living, which sounds like asserting everyone has the right to patronage.

Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.

Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.

PhasmaFelis
0 replies
1h55m

You're arguing that speech should earn a living

I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.

Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.

mardifoufs
0 replies
7h13m

I agree that ads are basically here to stay, in one form or another. And that most people arguing that the internet could migrate towards another model are probably wrong (people want free stuff, and a lot of people don't even mind ads sadly enough...). But I think that the user agent (the browser) shouldn't care at all about the sustainability of businesses or how viable blocking ads are for tech businesses. It should just do what's best for the user, or at least give the option to do that.

JumpCrisscross
0 replies
6h16m

focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price

We’re a minority. See: every comment complaining about paywalls.

commodoreboxer
9 replies
2h50m

Most importantly, advertisement is a business. It's not charity and it's not a publicly owned resource. It doesn't keep the Internet free, because it makes a boat load of money doing what it does. It doesn't take an expert understanding of economics to see that any belief that advertisement allows for a free Internet is smoke and mirrors. The money comes from somewhere, notably from you.

Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.

Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.

bluGill
6 replies
2h44m

It doesn't keep the Internet free

There are two different definitions of free.

Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However there is also freedom and advertising doesn't help there at all.

commodoreboxer
3 replies
2h33m

That's the rub. You do pay for it. By the intention and definition of the business, advertisement eventually extracts money from you. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise. The fact that it happens more subtly and enables them to extract money from you in ways that you don't notice doesn't change the fact that it's still paid for.

An advertisement funded Internet is still you paying for your content, it's just built so that you don't feel like you're paying for it. Advertisement is not free money, and it can not be free money. It's for-profit.

So with advertisement, you're still paying for the Internet. We don't have a free Internet. We have an Internet built around businesses that make their entire business around psychological manipulation and extracting money from people without being noticed. The fact that people still push the myth that advertisement enables a free Internet like ad companies are somehow a public service shows how good they are at manipulation.

benmanns
1 replies
2h2m

I think there are legitimate cases where a business has a product available at a price that is net positive to both the business (profitable) and customer (consumer surplus) but is having trouble connecting with consumers. What % of advertising this is versus pushing low quality trash, branding, status symbols, and scams, I have no idea.

gspencley
0 replies
1h12m

I've thought a lot about this because I owned and operated a business for 18 years, for 15 of those years it was my primary source of income, and it was entirely ad-based even though my "users" often complimented me on having an ad-free product. It was all affiliate promotion, they were there for the free content and it wasn't obvious that the free content was promo for subscription services, plus the affiliate links weren't being shoved in peoples' faces. They were there if people wanted more and were willing to pay, and the click-through rates were decent and it was profitable, so this type of "non-intrusive" advertising does work.

But ... I happen to be someone who REALLY DESPISES ADS ALWAYS

I'm not as "black pilled" as the comments that started this. My issue is not that ads try and psychologically manipulate people. I don't think that there is anything intrinsically wrong with trying to persuade someone to buy something.

My problem with ads is that they are annoying and distracting, most are this way by design, and they come at you completely unsolicited.

If there was a way that I could opt in or out of being shown ads in all areas of life, so that if I were interested in learning about new products I can, but if I'm not interested the ads can kindly fuck off and leave me alone ... that would be grand.

And that kind of exists. I mean, if I attend a ComicCon I'm going to a big trade show. I'm hoping that the show floor will have tons of wares and demos and such. I'm looking to buy. If I go on Amazon and start searching for products, by all means spam me with results related to what I'm looking for.

But if I'm trying to watch tv, or I'm on social media or in a context where I'm not actively looking to discover products that I might be interested in purchasing, I get downright offended and triggered when suddenly some dipshit character in a commercial is like: "look how ridiculous and annoying I am while using this product I want you to buy. If you buy it you can be just as moronic, obnoxious and annoying as me." In those situations I wish that advertising would just cease to exist in all forms all together.

bluGill
0 replies
1h29m

I have sometimes bought something via advertisement that I wouldn't have known existed without. As such I'm glad those advertisements exist because my life is better for those things.

Most advertisements are for junk that makes your life worse if you buy, but there are some that are useful.

autoexec
1 replies
2h6m

Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However

Ads and the spying they depend on only trick you into thinking that you aren't paying for it when in reality, not only are you paying (often resulting with money coming out of your pocket) but you also never get to stop paying for it.

Once your data is out there, it will be used against you for the rest of your life. It never goes away.

It'll be passed around to advertisers, data brokers, law enforcement, lawyers, employers, insurance companies, scammers, retailers, and activists and year after year, decade after decade, every single person who gets their hands on your data will try to use it against you in any and every way that they feel will be to their benefit, and it will almost always be at your expense.

bluGill
0 replies
1h28m

That is not a requirement for advertising. It is how it often works, but it need not be that way. How do we stop all the other side effects is the question. (I don't know the answer to this)

mrinfinitiesx
1 replies
1h29m

Right. Again, not our problem. We aren't making money off of it, they are, from exploiting us and finding new ways to psychologically enhance their ways of advertisement to make boatloads of money. That's a solid 'No.' - Everything is a giant billboard already, tailored and catered directly to an algorithm based solely on how it knows me better than I know me; I want less of that. The excuse 'it's how we pay for this and that' doesn't have to be acceptable by all of us, and isn't. Eventually enough has to be enough, that time should be now.

I view content. It either exists and is delivered to me, or it doesn't. Either way, I'm blocking it, for my mental health. I see your viewpoint. But, I'm not a metric, I'm not a KPI, I'm not a cost per click, or a cost per view. I don't want my data saved, tracked, bought, sold, manipulated, interpolated, twisted, catered and sprinkled on top to deliver to the next guy. I'm a human being.

I get it, I entirely do, but that's my stance. I'm sticking with it.

commodoreboxer
0 replies
16m

I agree with you. I was just pointing out that the idea of advertisement funding a free Internet is already a lie in the first place.

I am 100% anti advertisement, for the record. It is disgusting and non-consensual, and nobody should tolerate it.

lolinder
5 replies
5h21m

advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone

My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting.

Advertising-based social media took all the air from that model and replaced it with the enormous advertising-driven attention economy. Genuine social interaction was largely replaced by vacuous attempts to get "engagement" as the platforms persuaded millions to act in their interests. Vulnerable interactions with persistent communities that allowed real internet friendships to develop gave way to ephemeral rage bait that ruins real life friendships.

I'm not saying that advertising is the root of every single social ill we have today, but it's responsible for its good share of them.

spiritplumber
1 replies
3h35m

Having run one, I have to say that towards the end people were moving to social media BECAUSE posts had a like counter. I regret not adding one to my forum.

lolinder
0 replies
1h36m

Oh, for sure. They created a drug that suffocated all non-externally-rewarded social interaction and drew users in. But they created that drug in service to advertisements.

cptskippy
1 replies
50m

You could argue that greed is the driver. The social networks aren't displaying ads to fund maintaining their operations, they are operating in a for profit capacity and thus are incentivized to find ways to make you want to consume their product.

When someone operated a forum in the days of yore, they had the opportunity to put up ads and many did. The difference I think is that they were doing so to fund or offset the costs of operating the forum, not as a profit engine above and beyond the cost of keeping the lights on.

lolinder
0 replies
26m

That's fair. I think all advertising is naturally bad for the world, but you're right that it's the combination of advertising and greed that created the extremely deleterious environment we have now.

That said, greed fed by other monetization models would not have produced the attention economy, and I don't think the evils of other models (dark patterns for subscriptions, planned obselescence, etc) could have come close to the society-wide damage that the attention economy has caused.

thomastjeffery
0 replies
1h21m

The core problem, as I see it, is copyright.

Content must be hosted, and hosting costs money. So how is money going to interact with this system?

Copyright answered that question in the worst possible way. Copyright says that the content itself is the object with monetary value. To support that claim, copyright wraps every piece of content in a box, and says, "Whoever made this shall monopolize its value." In reality, only the box itself can actually behave as a discrete commodity, and no one truly creates content alone: all art is derivative, especially written media. Regardless of reality, copyright demands that we all participate in this delusional game.

So now everyone who hosts content is holding commodities. It's naturally advantageous to exploit the value of your commodities (you can reinvest your profit into actual value), so any business that does that will be more successful than the rest. Anyone who refuses to play the game will simply lose (or be prosecuted). So how do you sell forum posts and memes?

You don't. That doesn't make any sense, remember? You don't actually sell the content: you sell the box. You sell the warehouse. You sell the marketplace. This entire game is predicated on monopoly, so what's the most natural implementation? Vertical integration! Facebook and Twitter don't sell social networks: they sell social walls. What are those walls made of? Incompatibility. The best part is: if anyone tries to build a door into your wall, you get to sue them out of existence! It doesn't matter how broken or exploitative your business model is: if it is based on copyright, then it is guaranteed by law to succeed!

So now you own everyone and everything. How do you make money? By selling them to each other. In other words: advertising.

---

But wait, there's more! Copyright answered even more questions: How do you stop people from misrepresenting someone else's work as their own? How do you stop people from sharing your secrets? How do you censor abusive material? The answer is to prosecute fraud and abuse, because those are already illegal. Right? Right? No. That would make too much sense. The real answer is copyright.

timeon
1 replies
10h1m

> allows the internet to be free

As far as i know I still pay for internet. Only free internet is with public wifi.

bluGill
0 replies
2h34m

You pay for the pipe to your house (which in turn pays for the backbone). However the content is mostly things you don't pay for.

skydhash
1 replies
12h37m

No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us.

The internet is neither free, nor open. I'm paying for it and there are all the geo-blocked and walled content. I'm grateful for the parts that are accessible at least (without sucking my private data dry). I don't mind advertising, but it should be a function of what I'm currently watching/listening instead of myself. I pay for F1TV and there are so much logos, but I don't mind them. Likewise for Soccer.

account42
0 replies
12h3m

And free beer isn't free because you still need to pay for gas to haul it home?

That certain parts are locked off also doesn't make the internet as a whole not open.

kerkeslager
0 replies
8h4m

Yeah, being against advertising isn't fundamentally about privacy. I mean, I care about privacy too, but even an ad that collects no data about me is bad. I simply do not want products shoved in my face. If I need something from your company I'll come to you.

Yes, in the current environment, companies have to advertise to compete with competition that advertises. This is why we need to agree as a society to stop this nonsense, so that companies that don't advertise are in competition with other companies that don't advertise, competing for independent review based on the quality of their products and services.

Advertising undermines the fundamental premise that companies win in competition by providing the best products and services. An well-marketed inferior product outcompetes a poorly-marketed superior product every time, and that's a problem. Advertising should be viewed as anti-competitive, because it's not competing on the metrics that serve people's needs: which is the entire point of an economy.

kazinator
0 replies
2h26m

is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone

The internet is free to hardly anyone. People pay for broadband and mobile plans.

Free Wi-Fi hotspots are what actually keeps the internet free for many people.

anewguy9000
0 replies
2h41m

mozilla used to have this smart guy, brendan something, as their cto. but he was chased out of mozilla and created a new browser called brave. it actually does what this current cto claims to be trying to do

cjpearson
36 replies
10h53m

I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.)

If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.

1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad

2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad

3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing

It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.

Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.

lpcvoid
28 replies
8h32m

I personally don't care if 90% of websites which rely on advertising disappear or replace their monetization strategy with gated, paid access. I even think this is a good thing.

As such, I will fight the ability of websites to monetize by tracking wherever I can.

LunaSea
22 replies
7h24m

This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet.

Also most people don't want to pay for content.

This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

blueflow
10 replies
5h13m

This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

99.99% of your web.

LunaSea
9 replies
5h10m

99.99% of the web, full stop.

blueflow
8 replies
5h9m

What about HN? What about make-firefox-private-again.com? Go through the HN frontpage and the links. Thats why i'm sure you are wrong.

LunaSea
7 replies
4h53m

What about HN?

The same HN that is heavily moderated by a paid employee and paid for by a multi-billion dollars net worth company called YCombinator?

lolinder
6 replies
4h4m

Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable.

LunaSea
5 replies
3h10m

Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable.

That's not the question. Hacker News was used as an example of an old-school site that worked without monetisation. Which is clearly not the case.

cml123
3 replies
2h44m

Surely HN doesn't require the existence of YC as a startup accelerator to exist, right? HN has to me survived because of its community and shared values wrt discussion. The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.

LunaSea
1 replies
2h22m

The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.

Do you believe that users are going to pay to get access to HN?

zamubafoo
0 replies
2h8m

No, but I also believe that it's not so expensive that someone couldn't cover it if it was their hobby. This is doubly true if it's something like HN where it's not trying to scale to infinity.

krapp
0 replies
2h17m

If it weren't for YC and the network effect of of SV startup culture (remember it started as "Startup News"), HN would be just another niche forum from which most people would have migrated to Reddit ages ago. It might still exist, but only as a withered shell of its former self.

The only reason HN still persists at the scale that it does is precisely because of its association with YC and "tech bros," because the billion dollar venture capital firm running it has made it a part of their identity.

lolinder
0 replies
1h41m

You used the word monetization, everyone else in this subthread is talking about advertising. HN is funded as a piece of content marketing for a startup accelerator.

I suppose you could call the Launch HN threads ads, but only just, and they're of the absolute least objectionable sort—on topic, clearly labeled, unobtrusive, first party, with no tracking.

Dalewyn
5 replies
5h16m

Going back to 90s internet is a very good thing.

LunaSea
4 replies
5h10m

Which site from the 90s are you still visiting regularly in it's 90s form?

Dalewyn
2 replies
4h35m

/.

Dalewyn
0 replies
2h45m

I mean, they still don't/can't handle Unicode.

layer8
0 replies
2h33m

Personal blogs. Smaller online retailers. Not a web site, but Usenet and mailing lists.

pessimizer
3 replies
6h47m

This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet.

No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet.

And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.

This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them. The US seems like it's on the verge of state licensing of speech and journalism, and that sentiment is easily moved to any sort of internet hosting of any service.

bugtodiffer
1 replies
4h34m

the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow

This is already happening.

They wanted to make us pay more because we are using netflix and other streaming services so much.

Everything important like internet and streets should be built and maintained by the gov and not some random companies, f*ck Telekom.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
2h41m

The issue is our government doesn’t function anything like that. We don’t build roads. We write checks to for profit contractors to build our roads. What would government internet look like? A massive check to meta and more or less the same environment we have today.

LunaSea
0 replies
6h34m

And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.

They absolutely will have to since they won't have the means to serve the content to the community otherwise.

Niche websites won't stay niche for very long if they are the only free option.

I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them.

I don't see most of these free alternatives even existing in the first place. For example: free news reporting (not even talking about foreign correspondents & co).

lelanthran
0 replies
2h53m

This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

Fine by me.

I'll browse the remaining 0.01%, search engines will be useful again and people won't be doom-scrolling all the time to see morons eating.

marcinzm
4 replies
3h48m

That's not the alternative. The alternative is the death of most sites other than walled gardens like Meta and Amazon that own their own advertising end-to-end. Do you want the internet to be even more Meta controlled?

staplers
1 replies
2h46m

The internet and humanity would exist fine without advertisers. History has proven this to be true.

marcinzm
0 replies
54m

History doesn't move backward and the internet users of the mid 90s are not the internet users of now. Give the vast majority of internet users a choice between the internet of mid 90s (after that ads powered it all) and having nothing but large tech owned sites to browse I think you're delusional if you think they'd actually pick the former.

kjkjadksj
1 replies
2h45m

Who is using tracking? Its not mom and pop websites. Its big corporations. I could care less if they lost money. The internet would be a healthier place without corporations trying to shift public discourse in their favor.

marcinzm
0 replies
52m

Those mom and pop sites are often filled with trackers and ads. Assuming they haven't just moved to using a third party service that does it for them. It's like saying the person shooting you isn't at fault but only the gun they shoot you with.

perchlorate
2 replies
10h40m

Advertisers are going to use it as just another data point, though. Why give them any more information than they already have? You know some of the best technical people we have waste their lives working for advertisers, and they _will_ find a way to extract more information from these technologies regardless of how supposedly private they are.

I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.

I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.

roca
1 replies
8h42m

I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.

Indeed, but such regulation is much more likely to happen if there already exist privacy-preserving solutions like PPA.

"There's a good way to do it and a bad way, and we're making it illegal to do it the bad way" vs "There only way to do it is bad, and we're making that illegal, so sucks to be you"

bugtodiffer
0 replies
4h32m

This isn't an alternative, that's the argument

ajsnigrutin
1 replies
6h18m

We had safe and private advertising back in the 90s. Local computer store in Cityville would pay money to local Cityville forum, and when you'd open the "computers" subforum, the Computer store banner would be at the top.

Then advertisers and websites went beserk, covered every square centimeter with ads, including the content of the websites themselves, and started tracking everything, from location, age, gender to shoe and penis size, and the only way to browse the internet as a sane person is with an adblock.

They had the possibility to work with a few ads that didn't bother people, but that wasn't enough, so now, blocking just some of the ads isn't enough for us. They started with the shitty behaviour, and I don't care if they go bankrupt and websites switch to a new way of surviving.

godshatter
0 replies
1h36m

I keep hoping that enough people will start ad blocking and tracking script blocking that advertisers or companies wishing to advertise will have to find ways to deliver ads that doesn't involve tracking users, but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. People I know are mostly indifferent to ads or actually like seeing them sometimes so they can buy whatever the latest craze is. I find this situation absolutely maddening.

kerkeslager
0 replies
8h17m

But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet.

1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody is willing to pay for something, maybe it doesn't have value.

2. For a lot of what does have value, the problem might be your idea of what a "viable business model" is. If I write a weekly blog post and it makes $2000 a month, that's a viable business model. It's more than a lot of writing jobs pay. But it doesn't scale into some sort of multinational content corp so half of the people involved in the conversation are willing to write it off.

3. A lot of sites simply don't need to be businesses. I've paid hosting costs and helped moderate to help run forums, with no expectation of financial recompense, simply because I enjoyed the community. The best forums nearly universally work this way, still.

The real value of Reddit, for example, comes from subreddit moderators who are typically volunteers. Everything I value about Reddit is provided by people who don't work for Reddit, and the hosting/software could easily be swapped out with minimal impact for most of these communities. In fact, all the problems I've had with Reddit are caused by Reddit's decisions--I've never had a problem with an AskScience or ProgrammingLanguages moderator policy change, but Reddit makes some decision that harms their users significantly probably twice a year.

autoexec
0 replies
1h31m

It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA.

Let's start with the fact that they've added their spying as opt out instead of opt in because they know that if people were asked they would not consent to it. They're already disrespecting users by trying to slip this unwanted thing into their browser largely unnoticed.

There is no way to exploit and manipulate people that is safe and private. A browser is a user-agent. It's supposed to be working for you, the user. Not for advertisers who will try to manipulate you and take your money.

Mozilla is not working to protect your privacy and security. They are trying to come up with a scheme that will trick users who object to ads and reject surveillance capitalism into accepting them along with the violations of privacy and security they depend on.

There is nothing "noble" about this. This is just about making money at your expense. It's the exact same goal every other ad-tech company has.

SCdF
12 replies
11h42m

I just want to use a robust, secure and decently fast browser that uses a different backend than Chrome to support the open web not ossifying into a single browser spec. I'll pay monthly!

Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(

trustno2
6 replies
11h8m

There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux (there must be some...)

GNOME Web/Epiphany (same thing) seems to use WebKit and is officially supported

https://webkit.org/downloads/

https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/

It seems there is no WebKit browser for Windows.

sulandor
3 replies
10h52m

There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux

webkit was forked from the kde browser, not the other way.

trustno2
2 replies
10h26m

So? Epiphany is based on WebKit now, KDE Browser doesn't exist anymore. (I needed to check it first.)

graemep
1 replies
8h49m

Its called Konqueror, and exists, but it uses a webkit fork now!

Webkit was forked from KHTML which has been discontinued.

sulandor
0 replies
7h21m

i guess we are both right.

thx for the clarification

kjkjadksj
1 replies
2h37m

No good adblocking for safari like in firefox though

layer8
0 replies
2h26m

Extensions like AdGuard and Ghostery are pretty good.

freediver
2 replies
3h44m

If you use macOS/iOS, there is Orion. Webkit based, zero telemetry, lifetime license $150 USD, no other source of funding.

https://kagi.com/orion

kjkjadksj
1 replies
2h35m

With a price like that I’m assuming this product has a shelf life. It would make way more sense to ask a dollar a month. In 13 years they will have made more than that $150, and this model also incentivizes them to keep up development for years and years.

93po
0 replies
1h2m

for a fledgling project, $150 today is worth 10,000x $150 in 13 years.

bjord
0 replies
7h10m

looking forward to ten years from now, when it meets those requirements

sensanaty
2 replies
8h18m

The fact that the disgusting parasitic entity that is Meta is a part of this makes me sick to my stomach. The fact that the Mozilla CTO is supportive of Meta being a part of it? Just unspeakable.

chucksmash
1 replies
4h0m

Using overwrought rhetoric doesn't help to make your point.

ghostly_s
0 replies
1h37m

What point? They were describing their personal impressions. ffs.

red_trumpet
1 replies
9h7m

He doesn't explain how it works though, or why it is private. Only that we should trust them.

pacifika
1 replies
10h43m

Yup making this change will result in a slower move away from the current worse situation, which is less private then the proposed Mozilla future, is my reading.

thoroughburro
0 replies
5h44m

Because advertisers will voluntarily give up their other tracking tools? Does that sound likely?

nonrandomstring
1 replies
8h47m

The hypocrisy in this post is astonishing.

The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance

And Mozilla are contributing to it in all but name.

primary reason many of us are at Mozilla.

If that is the case, and this is the best fight you can muster give up, go home and hand over the fight to better people. A mission to create the weapons people need to fight online surveillance requires guile, a strong will, a strong stomach, a clear understanding of who the enemy is and the ability to stick to some basic principles,

Digital advertising is not going away

What kind of a defeatist attitude is that? People want it to go away. That's why they use Firefox. Mozilla are supposed to be defending that corner. What a lame cop out!

but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right.

We had a working system for digital advertisement in the 1990s. Go back to that and figure where you got lost.

The linked post is a sad masterpiece of appeasement, cowardice and snivelling apologetic. Mozilla is abandoning it's mission and selling out. The CEO should step down.

mrinfinitiesx
0 replies
5h20m

Truth.

ghostly_s
1 replies
1h38m

And unsurprisingly, he just lies. Here's the crux of the bullshit:

"It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting."

No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago.

What the advertisers want is all sorts of other info on you, whether you end up as a customer or not. And they and their willing accomplices, now including Mozilla, ardently frame this as a necessity to keep the ad-supported content industry alive. What they never mention is that industry was thriving with the bare minimum of data they had 30 years ago, and more to the point, thrived with NO DATA AT ALL for over a century before it moved onto computers.

Do you think Macy's got any data on "conversions" when they listed their sale prices in the local paper? Yet somehow they were happy to keep paying for it, without any apocalyptic screeds about the imminent "death of newspapers" if we didn't start making customers record their unique customer ID before opening the paper or entering a retailer's store.

The truth is quite contrary to the ad industry's narrative- it's clear the shift of power balance in favor of the advertisers has been associated with all the industries dependent upon it getting worse.

nine_k
0 replies
19m

To be honest, Macy's a century ago of course wanted data on conversions from newspaper ads. They could ask some customers whether they had seen the ad prior to going to shop. They could print coupons that you need to physically bring in to get a deal. They could pay agencies like Gallup to run more comprehensive customer research.

Shooting in the dark is a so-so strategy, and every business strives to do things in a more cost-efficient way.

(Corollary: if you want businesses to stop building dossiers on you, you have to make it unprofitable.)

blackeyeblitzar
10 replies
14h40m

Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I’m also not sure that the web can be made into something different unless web standards aren’t freed of influence by giants like Google

the_third_wave
2 replies
13h12m

They should concentrate on developing the browser and get out of political activism entirely. Use the rather large amount of money they already have as an investment fund to finance a slimmed-down operation while also soliciting donations from users and some select companies. Ditch the large administrative staff they gained during the Baker years, swap some of them out for developers. They should not try to be a PAC, there's enough of those already.

rnd0
1 replies
12h30m

Wouldn't this be a case where the iron law of bureaucracy applies? Meaning that the people who are already there and are invested in their 'mission' would resist any kind of reform of the organization because the primary task of any such organization is protecting itself from outsiders?

account42
0 replies
11h50m

Yes, but only because the Mozilla Foundation has the same problem. If it was just the corporation then the foundation could decide to replace it entirely.

shiroiushi
2 replies
13h4m

Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things.

I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission.

From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead use it for the Mozilla foundation which funds a bunch of social causes.

Wikipedia has a huge endowment, so they really don't need money to keep the lights on, but if you donate, it'll similarly be used for funding social causes through the Wikimedia Foundation.

There's also a Linux Foundation for funding Linux-related stuff, but here again a lot of it is spent on social causes, not directly on development-related costs.

You'd think that if funding were really that tight, social causes would be cut and just keeping the servers running and essential personnel employed would be the highest priority, with SW maintenance and development a close 2nd. So, apparently, money must not be that tight. Or, if it is, it's being woefully mismanaged. But I think there's more to it: it seems like when times are too good (something gets popular and gets funding), then the people in charge expand the scope of the project to consume all the funding, adding on various pet projects (like those social causes), instead of saving the money in case of a funding downturn later. Wikipedia probably did it best by setting up an endowment so that everything else is just gravy, but even here they're constantly asking for more money on the site and acting like they really need it when they don't.

kentrado
0 replies
3h26m

This is the case with most software "foundation".

As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, she did make an important observation.

Parasites will be attracted to high value things in order to extract value, not to add to it. They climb the hierarchy of the organisation and then use it for their own benefit.

It is not only developers who do resume building oriented work. These people start social causes so that they can claim that they spearheaded this or that campaign. In order to gain prestige.

Engineers who only care about the product become the bottom of the hierarchy and the organisation becomes a reflection of the needs and wants of these parasites.

blackeyeblitzar
0 replies
3h55m

It’s depressing that anything moderately successful may be doomed to being taken over this way, by people looking to abuse the institution for their own political activism. I wasn’t aware that Wikipedia also had the same issue. Not using donations for the core thing donors think they’re supporting is so deceptive.

account42
1 replies
11h55m

not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things

From donations and government grants. You know, like proper non-profits that aren't trying to LARP as a SV unicorn.

fsflover
0 replies
10h45m

Which software with hundreds of millions of lines of code survives like this? Ideally show us security-critical examples.

sensanaty
0 replies
8h55m

I'd donate to Mozilla if the money was actually going towards browser development, and not whatever idiotic bullshit the corp side of it decides to buy (like Pocket, for example) next.

Johanx64
0 replies
10h58m

Firefox been like this for atleast a decade.

All sorts of "experiments", normandy, telemetry, pocket, looking glass, all sorts of phoning back them or either google... so many things to name. And now this garbage to add to the list.

You have to do so much work in about:config to clean this up and i'm not sure if it can be fully.

Extremely scummy organisation.

jmakov
9 replies
14h23m

Can this be also disabled on Android?

kelnos
5 replies
13h20m

Sure, about:config works there as well.

Interestingly, it was already disabled on my phone, but enabled on desktop.

cma
4 replies
12h6m

Google likely pays them to disable about:config on Android or implies they won't pay them as much for default search and they read the tea leaves.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo...

It only works on the more insecure nightly version of firefox.

shiroiushi
1 replies
11h55m

I just checked this config value on my Firefox Nightly and it's already preset to false. Interesting.

kilburn
1 replies
11h40m

This is equivalent to about:config and works on the regular firefox mobile version too:

chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml

cma
0 replies
4h22m

Didn't work for me just now. When there have been ways in the past the non-nightly version wipes the changes each restart unless they are already exposed in settings I think.

remram
0 replies
3h11m

Go to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml and set dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false.

SubzeroCarnage
0 replies
1h44m

Firefox 128.0.3 and higher has this globally disabled for Android.

kelnos
7 replies
13h24m

This is absolutely disgusting. Despite Mozilla's general decline, I always want to believe they're going to do the right thing by their users. But this is really hard to swallow.

Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.

roca
4 replies
8h39m

Then I think it's only fair for you to completely stop using ad-supported sites and services, right away.

(Which will also mean that Firefox's treatment of ads will not affect you.)

bux93
3 replies
7h35m

What do you mean you don't want to sleep with me? It's a date! I paid for dinner!

- advertisers

LunaSea
2 replies
7h23m

"It's not stealing, I'm just freely accessing your paid content"

- users

nmeagent
0 replies
5h35m

"Officer, arrest this man! He had the gall to show up at my site and only consume some of the content I tried to shove into his face!"

anononaut
0 replies
3h6m

They can always refuse to serve me anything. That's equally fair.

bjord
1 replies
6h21m

I just did a quick search of your comments on HN and I see that you're regularly sharing/using links to archive.is in an effort to bypass paywalls.

So, given that you're unwilling to pay and that you believe advertising is unethical, how do you expect people to fund the content you consume?

Don't you think it's unethical to expect they do it for free?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author%3Akelnos%20archive&type...

godshatter
0 replies
1h14m

Not the person you are replying to, but it's not up to me to determine what the best business model is for a company. My "job" with respect to info providers here is to consume what I like on an open protocol. If I find a website that interests me enough, by itself, to subscribe to it then maybe I would. But none of them have, not even any of the big ones. If someone provided a system where I could tip a website for an article or other piece of media I like, I'd do that. But nobody seems to know how to make micro-transactions work that I can see.

So if advertising is unwanted, and subscriptions to individual websites on the internet isn't working either, then maybe they should get more creative.

I had a lot of fun on old forums before this mess started, so if we revert to that so be it.

red_admiral
6 replies
10h23m

From the CEO's comments on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...):

we support people configuring their browser however they choose

I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.

bravetraveler
3 replies
10h17m

That offer to refresh always seemed a bit strange to me.

It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done.

Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application.

Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This shouldn't amount to wiping the profile/extensions

takluyver
2 replies
10h4m

I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance.

I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.

red_admiral
0 replies
6h7m

I would agree in general, but arguably uninstalling ublock makes the web much slower.

bjord
0 replies
6h48m

it is—it uninstalls all of your bloat

the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one

mccr8
0 replies
3h17m

That's the CTO, not the CEO.

93po
0 replies
1h5m

that's a really disappointing dark pattern from mozilla

stuartd
5 replies
19h43m

A bash script to set a config value…?

I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away.

Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.

I’ll still block them, though.

[0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)

Terr_
3 replies
17h15m

The actual change-commands aren't actually that much longer than its worrisome instructions telling you to download unpredictable arbitrary data from an internet URL and blindly execute it.

shiomiru
1 replies
10h51m

A picture-based guide seems both safer and more effective. e.g. many Firefox users run Windows, where curl | sh doesn't even work - clicking on the right buttons also requires less technical expertise.

sn0wleppard
0 replies
10h39m

You don't even have to go to about:config - it's got a checkbox on the user settings page!

deadbolt
0 replies
16h41m

"Concerned about your privacy? Don't worry, just pipe this code right to your shell"

:\

Setting the flag in about:config is simple enough, I don't understand why anyone would do anything else. Who's seeing this page who is also unable to make an about:config change?

account42
0 replies
11h58m

Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.

This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.

jqpabc123
4 replies
6h16m

There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising.

This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.

"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.

"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.

This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.

The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?

kmeisthax
1 replies
2h26m

Personalized advertising has one key property that is very useful to this generation of Internet companies: it moves the ad dollars away from websites selling ads (aka "publishers") and to the networks (Google/Facebook).

If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper.

This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue.

[0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.

jqpabc123
0 replies
2h0m

Which are much cheaper.

Are they? According to whom and compared to what --- the ad networks themselves? They control everything about this game.

It's possible for someone with deep pockets to build an ad network that operates in a similar manner and offers pretty much everything Google and Facebook do minus the privacy invasion crap.

The only essential difference being how the ads are targeted. Instead of targeting individuals, the web content they are looking at would become the target --- based on the blatantly obvious "metric" that the individual must have at least some interest in what they're looking at.

This should actually be easier/cheaper to implement and maintain (no personalized metrics) and thus the ads should be less expensive. The main reason this doesn't exist in a more popular form --- Google/Facebook have sold advertisers a big load of their own marketing hype and used this to effectively monopolize the market.

brezelgoring
1 replies
3h36m

Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist.

Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.

rcxdude
0 replies
3h28m

All-sites still have a context in which their ads appear. You are looking at some content on their site, so thy can advertise in the context of that content.

pointlessone
3 replies
8h3m

Why does this have to be curl | sh if there’s a checkbox in the settings for this specific setting? Do you value your privacy so much that you’re ready to run arbitrary script directly from internet?

spinningslate
0 replies
5h50m

The site covers all bases. The content of the script is shown on the landing page - and you have to visit it to see the instructions to run it. The comment also explains how to do it through through the configuration UI.

That means you have 3 choices:

* Use curl to run the script as directed

* copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run

* follow the instructions to update through the UI.

prmoustache
0 replies
7h21m

OTOH the script is 2 lines long and perfectly readable/understandable.

olejorgenb
0 replies
3h29m

It annoys me that Firefox removed the ability to link directly to a setting in `about:config`. I'm almost certain this was possible before.

Yodel0914
3 replies
11h36m

I recently switched to LibreWolf[0] and, after tweaking a few settings that were more zealous that I'd like, it has been just as good as vanilla FF.

0: https://librewolf.net/

eitland
1 replies
9h16m

Have used it as my secondary browser (~everything that doesn't need login: documentation, news, etc) for a couple of years now and it is great.

Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that:

- stays up to date with development of FF

- turns off all the stupid ideas

- gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things

I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so.

So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying.

If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)

michael9423
0 replies
1h49m

Librewolf does #1 and #2 already. But generally, there's no market for that.

Most of those who say "I would pay for that" would indeed never do it. Because those people want something very specific - something you can only have via extensions and personal modifications. What you want is very specific to what you personally want and it is different to what everyone else wants.

And no one can create a browser project for your personal preferences.

Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to."

Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork.

People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user.

And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.

podiki
0 replies
2h14m

What settings and why? Did they break some sites? Been meaning to try LibreWolf too.

OutOfHere
3 replies
14h39m

`dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled` already was false. If you're having to set it manually in `about:config`, you're likely missing something bigger in `about:preferences#privacy`.

sn0wleppard
0 replies
10h40m

Yeah, I'd already turned it from the standard settings page.

remram
0 replies
3h12m

Do you know if there's a GUI setting that controls that on mobile?

kelnos
0 replies
13h25m

Odd, it was 'true' for me, and I have all the privacy stuff in there set to the most private of settings. There was one section in there with an option labeled:

Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement

Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox.

I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

Hard_Space
1 replies
6h38m

Please be aware that at least one of these settings will log you out of all your accounts (I suspect it may be the one related to fingerprinting, though I am not certain). If, as I am, you are signed into 10-20 essential accounts, including work accounts, it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state, even after you have reversed some of the settings outlined here.

There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings.

Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.

layer8
0 replies
2h27m

it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state

Creating a backup before making any changes would solve that.

willywanker
2 replies
11h4m

Or use Pale Moon, forked long ago and developed independently, that respects your privacy out of the box without needing 50 different 'hardening' Arkenfox type changes or having to keep watch every time Mozilla tries to screw over end users like this. Zero telemetry, zero advertising and no mental gymnastics over how we're financially dependent on Google but still value your privacy. And bonus, it retains XUL extension support and the full customizability that went with it (including full support for full themes that can make it resemble Chrome or modern Firefox if you want to).

luuurker
0 replies
6h1m

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear "Pale Moon" is their toxic developers. But let's ignore that... Is it safe to use Pale Moon as your main browser? How many security patches is it missing from upstream Firefox? Do they have any security team?

I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.

efilife
0 replies
9h22m

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/palemoon

This article is 5 years old and I'm not sure whether it's accurate anymore, but might be worth checking to be sure we are completely private.

I also remember some drama about pale moon's author despising TOR and not wanting uBlock to work

horsawlarway
2 replies
4h2m

Ditch Mozilla. Full stop.

They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.

baliex
1 replies
3h6m

Where do you propose we go instead?

horsawlarway
0 replies
2h17m

Personally - I use ungoogled-chromium, librewolf, and ladybird.

The first two are still fairly dependent on the upstream companies - but at least they're ripping out the junk - They are pragmatic solutions in the short term.

Ladybird is nicely independent in the sense that's truly one of the few offerings that isn't a derivative of Firefox/Chromium, but it's not "ready" yet for most daily uses.

But seriously - please don't fall for the Mozilla marketing that Firefox is some privacy beacon as an alternative to Chrome. It's marketing not reality.

yu3zhou4
1 replies
10h35m

Author mentions this: https://web.archive.org/web/20181120211720/https://make-linu...

pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier

Looks like a set of kernel params that turn off security features to speed up the OS. Did anyone test it in practice?

perchlorate
0 replies
10h29m

Just set mitigations=off if you want this, it's a meta-parameter that enables all the others. I used to run it on old hardware (Haswell) because of significant impact of all those mitigations on IO performance. It's not a problem anymore on my newer Zen 4.

Probably a bad idea in the general case if you work with anything remotely private (ssh keys, banking) and browse the internet routinely. I visit few weird sites and block JS almost everywhere, so it both made sense to me and was relatively safe.

kreyenborgi
1 replies
10h37m

https://support.mozilla.org/no/kb/privacy-preserving-attribu... explains what the setting is about, the important bit being:

  > 3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but
  > does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts
  > the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed
  > Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.

  > 4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the
  > aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives
  > a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides
  > differential privacy.
The above docs also tell you how to turn it off with mouse clicks in regular settings (I don't understand why OP proposes to set it using the command line, perhaps so they can run it as a cronjob in case it gets reset? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

-----

The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)

remram
0 replies
3h14m

Did you find a way on mobile, other than browsing to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml and finding dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled?

account42
1 replies
12h6m

curl | sh for THIS? Riiight, let's give that website permission to execute arbitrary code on your computer just to change a single FF preference? Really????

clemailacct1
0 replies
37m

I think this is a bit of a sensational take. The code being executed is all there without obfuscation.

red_admiral
0 replies
10h26m

What I'd really like is to edit the file (sqlite database?) where my "ad topics" are stored. Just because I search for X once doesn't mean I want to see ads about it in future.

Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.

modzu
0 replies
2h25m

mozilla going all in on advertising as a hedge against losing their google funding? it is sad. i support brave, but if brave went away whats left? did we lose?

kuon
0 replies
6h10m

Do you know the list of domain we can block to do this at the firewall level?

I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).

clcaev
0 replies
6h10m

Perhaps we could have a search engine that indexes only pages free of advertising?

LordShredda
0 replies
7h4m

It's disabled on Arch by default. Maybe choose an operating system that doesn't treat you like a product?

DavideNL
0 replies
10h0m

Strange, apparently the setting (dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled) still hasn't been added to Arkenfox user.js ?

I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet.

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

3np
0 replies
15h7m

Here is the actual script, if you prefer copy-pasting a one-liner over curl|sh...

    echo 'user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);' | tee -a  $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$(grep "Default=.*\.default*" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" | cut -d"=" -f2)/user.js